Zombies vs. Humans

The Game

Many years ago, there once was a Minecraft server called Full. It was a minigame server with only one game: zombies vs. humans.

Not a particularly unique idea, but very effective for having fun. The basics were simple: a zombie is randomly chosen and tasked to infect all other humans by killing them. If they and their new infected teammates are successful before the timer runs out, the zombies win. If not, the humans wins.

The game takes place in a flat, rectangular arena, humans spawning on one end and zombies on the other. At a fixed internal, a few blocks are given to all players, allowing them to protect themselves with fortresses and towers.

There were, additionally, a number of strategic elements to keep it interesting: classes, maps, levels, loot crates, item shops, custom items and models, and more.

With only a few players, it was dull. But, with 10 or 20 or 30, you can imagine the chaos. I have many great memories with my friends, fearfully fending off zombies.

The Fall

The problem arose with the growth. The lead developer and owner, SuperJava (fitting, as the plugin that made the game possible was written in Java), figured all these players would be interested in other games, this one being so popular. He made void survial, prison, parkour, hide and seek, ZvH classic, and more.
Some did like the new games, but it did not attract many new players. While it was successful at first, this split the playerbase. As the hype died, few games didn't retain enough players to florish.

Gadually, as less players joined zombies vs. humans, the real fun of the mass chaos was in the past. It wasn't fun any more, causing more players to not play. It wasn't long before zombies vs. humans was removed from the server all together.

For a period, the server was a shell of it's former self; it went through a rebrand, multiple resets to generic minigames, until no one played at all.

During the summer of 2024, I remembered the good 'ol days of zombies vs. humans, and wished it were still around.
I wasn't the only one who thought this; people sometimes returned to its Discord server to express similar feelings:

Unfortunately, the owner wasn't very enthusiastic about bringing it back:

Then I had a thought: I could remake it myself. I know how to code, and in Java, in constrast to my younger self.

The (Momentary) Revival

In this way, too, it could be further improved; the games was not without problems. For instance, the leveling system caused a large difference between player's gear: a new player with no armor was destroyed by zombies, while a leveled player was unfazed by a horde. This left both extremes feeling helpless.

Another gripe of mine was the custom models: they may be cool to some, but I thought them frivolous. The resourcepack that provided them took a while to load, which made joining and leaving the server annoying.

In my remake, I tried to solve these issues by nerfing leveling upgrades, avoiding a server resourcepack, and writing a guide for new players.

While I had a server with some players, I figured I'd try out some things. For fun, I added monetization with Tebex: block colors and particle cosmetics. The web store is located here if you're curious.

Hosting

In the beginning, I hosted the server on my home computer, which wasn't ideal. On a recommendation from a friend, I chose ShockByte to host it instead. Their Minecraft tier only differ by RAM, so I used one of their cheapest tiers of 2GB. It did well enough, and I had a shortage or memory.

I've been quite happy with the service. They included a MySQL database for free, which I eventually took advantage of to store player statistics.

Excitement

With zombies vs. humans finally back, I was able to have similar fun as in the original. Some Full veterans came and played for awhile, which made me very happy to see. However, the playerbase soon declined. It was suggested I adverise and host events, but I didn't have much luck with either, and didn't put much effort into doing so.

Withdrawal

Before I started university, I handed off the files to FilipTV2, an active player willing to host the game on their server instead. At the time, there were barely any active players, so there wasn't much point in paying for a dead server. Besides, I didn't think I would have much time to moderate and further develop going forward. I'm thankful that FilipTV2 was willing to.
For reference, they used Bloom Host.